I wanted to run this by you all, to see if it's feasible. It would be
easy and very effective.
I was considering adding to the existing "news:" URL, such that it would
allow links to a particular byte range within the body of a given post.
It would be something like this:
news:<message-id>@host/243-300
A system like this could save a lot of bandwidth, as people who would
previously post huge chunks of the previous post would instead only
link to those chunks, which a browser could even display inline. Less
data would have to be re-sent across the Internet. Best of all, none of
the existing architecture would have to change, outside of the
news-browser handling the new URL.
What we're already observing with Netscape Communicator and soon IE is
the integration of news with WWW. Current browsers already have support
for newsreading which threads articles together according to the
References: header field, translating HTML embedded in the post. If
they became able to interpret a fine-grained "news:" URL, Usenet could
become the architecture for a fully integrated hypertext system,
complete with fine-grained referencing and backlinking, as hypertext was
originally conceived.
Thoughts?
-He who laughs last thinks slowest-
dAN